Project Work

Students interviewed their grown ups, their parents and grandparents about what school was like when they were young.

Some parents went to day school and some went to boarding school and there were accounts from schools at home and abroad.

The earliest account was from 1938. “Many children walked and when it rained they ran. Some drank a little bottle of milk at break time.

The boys wore shorts, a jacket and cap. The girls wore a smock or pinafore over their clothes to protect them. When it was cold children would were their coats in school”.

This is an account from 1946: “There were 55-60 boys in a class and the classroom was heated by a fire. The children all sat in rows of desks all facing teacher. In the summer term, many children came to school barefoot”.

“In Poland there are no uniforms, by law since 1976. When I went to school, it started at 8 ended at 2.30. In the yard girls played with elastics. The boys plays soccer, chess, join the dots. There was 3-4 hours homework every day!”

Some people remembered high windows. They let in plenty light, but the children couldn’t look out and be distracted.

“There was wooden desk with a top that lifted up where we kept our books copies and pencils. We enjoyed playing with friends, chasing, football, hurling, skipping and hopscotch. Great times, loads of fun no worries”

“When we are eager to grow up and leave school, we hear people say that they are your happiest days and we aren’t sure if we believe them but later you realize they were right and you school friends are friends for life”

Thanks to all the ‘older people’, who agreed to be interviewed about school in other countries and in olden days!

We can see that some things are the same and some things are very different.

I do an amount of project based learning particularly in SESE. I just think that one has to be very systematic and structured to get the most value from it as a methodology.

I am still struggling with maximizing the benefits of co-operative learning. I feel without a lot of initial direction from teachers, it can fail and have a detrimental effect on the participants, resulting in very little learning.

My own personal and teaching journey goes some way towards explaining my reservations. I am a child of an Irish classroom of the 60s where collaboration was not encouraged! I started teaching in the early 80s where it was seen as an enormous ‘sticking plaster’ where it would be the answer to nearly everything.

At the time the enormous creativity shown in classrooms in the UK were given to us as exemplars. It seemed to me at the time that project based learning was presented nearly as an alternative to strict objective based lesson planning.

I was on my own learning curve when I first started teaching. I had a third class. Deciding that project work was mostly about process and developing research skills I gave the children ‘free choice’ in terms of deciding on their topic with the very first project that we did.

Then each child set about researching their subject. In those days our main source of information was a twenty volume sets of the Children’s Britannica. In my first year teaching I asked one child to look up Russia, her chosen topic. Some long moments later when she hadn’t resurfaced, I went to look for her and found that she had started at the beginning, looking through Volume One Aa – Ay and was laboriously going through each book page by page. That’s when I realized I’d have to teach research skills.

To further elaborate on my reservations about the use of projects in class I wI think Allan Ahlberg‘s poem ‘Do a Project’ sums up my reservations about project work and co-operative learning

Do a project…

Do a project on dinosaurs

Do a project on sport

Do a project on the Empire State Building

The Eiffel Tower

The Blackpool Tower

The top of a bus

Ride a project on horses

Such a project on sweets

Play a project on the piano

Chop a project on trees

Down.

Write a project on paper

A plaster cast

The back of an envelope

The head of a pin

Write a project on the Great Wall of China

Hadrian’s wall

The playground wall

Mrs Wall

Do a project in pencil

In ink

In half an hour

In bed

Instead

Of someone else

In verse

Or worse

Do a project in playtime

Do a project on your hands and knees

Your head

With one arm tied behind you

Do a project wearing handcuffs

In a steel coffin

Eighty feet down

At the bottom of the Hudson River

(which ideally is frozen over)

On Houdini

Forget a project on memory

And refuse one on obedience.

There is also a story that sums the dynamic I often see where there is a group based project where not everyone is pulling their weight.

A Little Story

This is a story

About four people

Named

Everybody

Somebody

Anybody and nobody.

There was an

Important job to

Be done and

Everybody was

Sure that

Somebody would

Do it.

Anybody

Could have done

It, but nobody

Did it.

Somebody

Got angry about

That, because it

Was everybody’s

Job. Everybody

Thought that

Anybody could

Do it, but nobody

realised that

Everybody

Wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that

Everybody

blamed

Somebody when

Nobody did what

Anybody could

Have done.

So it is vital that the teacher monitored that the goals are being achieved and that the participants are maintaining an effective working relationship. Judicious assigning of roles to the team helps.

Imagine it is Easter already! The year is flying by. Teacher is delighted to report that Second Class, Room 6 are making excellent progress in learning their addition and take away tables. We will be ready for the challenges of multiplication and division next year in Third Class.

We have done a lot of science this year. We made a walkie talkie using tin cans which really worked. But we decided that the best fun we had in Science was the day we made Baking Powder Bombs. A close second was the day we experimented with the static electricity using balloons and made our hair stand on end 🙂

We are doing a lot of project work. We began by doing projects on the owl. This was because we were reading ‘The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson.

We followed up be doing projects on animals we met in another book by the same author ‘The Aardvark Who Wasn’t Sure’. We learn that aardvark means ‘earth pig’ and they like to eat termites. We learnt about nocturnal and diurnal animals. We learnt about their habitats. For example aardvarks live in the veldt in Africa. We learnt whether they were herbivores, carnivores, insectivores or omnivores.

Another day we were learning how to write riddles. We saw this one online;
‘I live in the canopy. I rarely touch the forest floor. I hang upside down all day. I move as slow as a tortoise. My hair is brown and green. I eat tree leaves. Who am I?
Can you guess the answer.

It is a sloth.
We became so interested in them we ended up doing a project about these fascinating animals too.
They are a greenish brown because they are so slow moving a green algae grows on their fur!

One hundred marks are allocated for each project.
Students get marks for an eye catching title for their project.
– They get a mark if they have a title.
– They get another one if the overall look of the title is neat.
– And another one if letter formation is good.
– Another mark is earned if the words in the title are spelt correctly.
Further marks can be gained if the title is done
– in decorative writing,
– in colour,
– with pictures or graphics.
Marks are also awarded
– if the title is more than one word
– and is original.
All in all, the title can earn 10 marks.

Teacher will award 10 marks for originality.
This means that the project should be written in the children’s own words.
To do the project Teacher will give out an information sheet.
The children shouldn’t write down information from this sheet word for word.
Instead they should write it in their own way.
Bright ideas and original drawings also gain marks for originality.

Illustrations or pictures are an easy way of gaining 20 marks.
Teacher will give up to ten marks for the main picture and will give one or two marks for small additional illustrations.

During these recessionary times, I’m sure you will agree it is better if illustrations are the children’s own work, rather than down loaded from the internet and printed off. From the learning point of view also, I think original pictures from the children are better.

Content is very important and can earn the student up to twenty marks.
Generally Teacher awards one mark for each piece of information.
Original information that the student provides themselves gain even more marks.

But this information has to be accurate.Accuracy and correct spellings gain twenty marks.
A mark is lost for every incorrect spelling up to a total of 20.
I would also like the information to be given in sentences
that start with a capital letter and ends in a full stop.

Good handwriting can earn up to ten marks andneat presentation gets another ten.

All in all these projects are marked out of one hundred.

Children should be encouraged to try to improve on their own score each time,
rather than compete with one another.

Student Blogging Challenge

We LOVE to share.

You are VERY welcome to use the original content from this blog. However if you are reposting any of this content directly to another class blog please attribute it to 'If Only The Best Birds Sang'. Please observe copyright as we ourselves endeavour to do. Thank you :)